Abstract
The aim of this study is to investigate how a community of practice focused on becoming a teacher of secondary school mathematics emerged during a pre-service teacher education programme and was sustained after students graduated and began their first year of full-time teaching in schools. Bulletin board discussions of one pre-service cohort are analysed in terms of Wenger’s (1998) three defining features of a community of practice: mutual engagement of participants, negotiation of a joint enterprise, and development of a shared repertoire for creating meaning. Emergence of the online community was associated with our own role in facilitating professional dialogue, the voluntary and unstructured nature of participation, initial face-to-face interaction that created familiarity and trust, and the convenience of using email rather than logging on to a website. The study shows that the emergent design of the community contributed to its sustainability in allowing the pre-service and beginning teachers to define their own professional goals and values.
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Notes
The pre-service teachers did not start posting messages to their own student bulletin board until March 2004.
Although pre-service teachers posted fewer messages per person to the course bulletin board than the authors, voluntary participation structures rarely elicit even this level of interaction in online discussion. For example, Schuck (2003) found that more than 60% of students in her pre-service mathematics education course did not use the bulletin board at all, while in-service mathematics teachers participating in Stephens and Hartmann’s (2004) study were also reluctant to use an online professional development forum.
In online discussions conducted entirely on a web-based bulletin board, this analysis involves counting and categorising messages in each thread of the discussion. However, the Yahoo Groups website also allows members to send messages via e-mail, and this was the mode of communication favoured by all participants. A member who wanted to initiate a new discussion topic almost always did so by replying to an earlier e-mail because this avoided the necessity of memorising the Group e-mail list address. This meant that e-mail subject lines rarely matched the content of the message, thus making identification and analysis of discussion threads extremely difficult. The figures quoted here are based on a manual analysis of the content of each e-mail message.
This phase by phase quantitative analysis is designed to follow the trajectory of the 2003 pre-service cohort. In the first three phases of the B.Ed (professional year coursework, practicum, summer semester) they posted messages only to the course bulletin board, as they had not yet established their own student bulletin board. Because the remaining phases overlapped with the arrival of the new 2004 cohort and the introduction of this cohort to the course bulletin board, the analysis of initiating and responding messages takes the student bulletin board as the source of messages posted by the 2003 cohort in the internship, post-internship coursework, and post-graduation phases.
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This research was funded by Discovery Grant #DP 0208803 awarded by the Australian Research Council.
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Goos, M.E., Bennison, A. Developing a communal identity as beginning teachers of mathematics: Emergence of an online community of practice. J Math Teacher Educ 11, 41–60 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10857-007-9061-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10857-007-9061-9